Posts Tagged ‘Haemimont Games’

Share this:

I shed a surprising amount of tears during the founding of my first red planet colony in Surviving Mars. None of those tears had anything to do with the pipe leak that killed 58 people, I hasten to add. For those, I just swore at my repair drones and made more colonists work gruelling night-shifts at the polymer factory so we could patch up the air tubes.

My tears, I’m afraid, came instead at testaments to my own magnificence: when a dusty patch of sand patrolled by listless worker robots and automated factories saw the construction of its first bio-dome, when the first humans from Earth arrived to stake out a new life in this place I had built for them, when the first non-Earth baby was born. Live inside my work, ye Martians, and try not get caught inside a meteor storm.

Share this:

The cubes are black, and shiny, and mobile. They hover in a neat, impossible stack outside one of my colony’s larger domes, clicking delicately about one another, always returning to the same overall shape, harming nobody. My robot rovers form a cautious circle around them while my scientists scratch their heads and bicker. I look at the cubes, one of the many Mysteries of Haemimont’s deceptively by-the-numbers management sim Surviving Mars, and the cubes, somehow, look right back at me.

My colonists are also looking at the cubes, noses pressed against their reinforced dome walls. The cubes are giving my colonists some funny ideas. One group considers them a threat, and wants me to blast them to bits with high-energy ions. Others hail them as gifts from some alien god, and want them brought inside the domes where they can be worshipped. A third, undecided faction argues that the cubes should be stored for further study. Everybody is at each other’s throats, and everybody is looking to me for a decision.

Share this:

The people living in my new habitat dome have jobs to do, that’s what brought them to Mars in the first place, but when they finish work they have two choices: they can either go to the casino or the bar. I could have built a gym or some other kind of leisure facility, but I went with the casino and bar combo. It’s what I’d want if I had to live in a dome on a hostile planet.

Share this:

Surviving Mars [official site] looks like it’s shaping up nicely, if you ask me. Made by Tropico 3 developers Haemimont, it’s a base-building game set on the Red Planet in which you hunt for resources to power settlements housed in giant glass domes.

Judging by the new trailer, featuring the first in-game footage, it’s one to keep an eye on: there’s the snappy animations of games like Cities: Skyline (which shares a publisher – Paradox Interactive) when you place a structure down, be that a twirling generator or a solar panel. And those domes are full of colour and provide a real contrast to the red around them. But, as the trailer suggests, it’s not simply an idyllic space holiday because there will be disasters like meteor strikes to try and get through.

Share this:

During the opening hours, you won’t see a single person in Surviving Mars [official site]. It’s a bold choice, having impersonal robots out there laying the groundwork of a colony, but the benefits are immediately obvious when watching the game in action. There’s a certain Factorium-like mechanical satisfaction to the flow of metal, creating supply chains that stud the surface with structures. The great advantage is the gradual shift from a red planet to a green planet though, even if those bubbles of green are few and far between.

More than any other city builder I can think of, Surviving Mars has the potential to show the life of a settlement, and it does that by beginning in a dead place.

Share this:

In a new partnership with Tropico developers Haemimont Games, Paradox have announced a Matt Damon simulator / colonial-management-city-builder Surviving Mars [official site]. It’s a “hardcore management game” about the colonisation of Mars and if the short trailer is anything to go by, it’ll be leaning toward the EVERYTHING GOES WRONG end of the management spectrum. One for Brendan, then, who does like to put poor little colonists through the wringer.

Share this:

Our John wasn’t convinced of action-RPG-with-giant-effing-spiders Victor Vran [official site] when it released this year, but developer Haemimont Games has been working on a few additional features since then, so maybe that’ll swing things around.

Share this:

Victor Vran [official site] is an unspectacular but fun action-RPG, says our John. Motörhead are a bitchin’ cool rock band, says me. What happens if you combine the two? I stare at my inbox muttering “Huh? Is that… huh?” that’s what. Then I sit down at my telegraph machine to compose a missive to RPS explaining that a Motörhead-themed add-on is coming to Victor Vran.

The unlikely pairing will introduce a new storyline touring landscapes inspired by the many moods of Motörhead, in the expansion named Motörhead through the Ages. I’m imagining Brütal Legend with more ladies wearing hot pants, biker caps, and bullet belts.

Share this:

Good news for you out there in the Republic of RPS: Tropico 5 [official site] has been updated with a map and mission editor packing Steam Workshop support, which means you can now take directly to the comments section to give your best laboured Communism + Collective Land Improvement + Map Sharing gag. It’s only for the Windows Steam version, though.

Share this:

When our John wanted to click on monsters until they exploded in showers of pennies, blades, and garments, Adam pointed him towards Victor Vran [official site]. The demon-hunting action-RPG had only just launched into Steam Early Access, but John dug it. Unhelpfully, he didn’t leave snappy soundbites like “it blew me away” or “it murdered its way into my heart” – would it kill you, John? – so just trust me on that if you’re too lazy to read his impressions yourself.

Anyway, Victor Vran left Early Access and properly launched today, presumably making it even better. Big updates are still planned for the future, though.

Share this:

Don’t you hate it when you’re trying to run your country on a system of illegal cheese blackmarkets and then those pesky enemy spies start butting their head in? This must be the sort of thing Angelina Jolie sits around thinking about all day.

And by extension, I myself am like Angelina Jolie in a way as I sit here contemplating my unholy reign upon Tropico [official site]. The game’s fifth entry hit last year, and I should note our Alec wasn’t too hot on it when it released – you can read his words here where he says among other things: “There are some bum notes both tonally and strategically.”

Share this:

One morning in mid-February, John demanded that I point him in the direction of a “good ARPG”. I briefly considered mocking up a new title page for DOTA 2, convinced that the in-game graphics were ARPGish enough to fool him, but I didn’t go through with it. While the idea of John stumbling through a MOBA match is enormously entertaining, I’m not a very good fraudster.

Instead, I suggested he check out Victor Vran. And he did. Now, Vran is receiving a coop update and superficially similar slay ’em up The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is receiving a second sequel.

Share this:

aRPGs are an odd genre, with there being so popular, but with so few that stand out. Obviously the Diablos, the Torchlights, and the Titan Quests. There’s Path Of Exile, there’s Grim Dawn, and then it gets trickier. The dreary Dungeon Siege games? The clumsy Sacred series? The almost there Van Helsing silliness? I think we may have a game that could sneak into the list, however, with Victor Vran [official site], currently in Early Access.

Haemimont are promising that their action RPG will place emphasis on the action side of the equation, and the trailer does seem to involve rather more mobility and dodging about than the last few lootguzzlers I played.

Share this:

New Tropico games aren’t appearing as quickly as my brain thinks. This is simply that I now perceive time at such a pace that the world is a dizzying blur around me. If you’d held a knifegun to my headthroat and demanded a release date for Tropico 4, I’d have tried to second-guess myself and suggested late 2012. It was in fact August 2011, and I am an old, confused man, unsure why the Christmasses won’t stop happening. Anyway, my confused rambling aside, Tropico 5 is appearing a very appropriate three years after the last time El Presidente reared his undemocratic city building head, and is now accepting applications for its March beta.

Share this:

I’m not a violent man by any means and that should make me very uneasy about my fondness for gangsters, but I far prefer them to other murderous avatars. I’m thinking pirates, ninja, warfighters and bald space marines. That was reason enough to draw my eyes to Omerta: City of Gangsters when it was first announced and I’ve finally played through the campaign of this city-conquering strategy game. I’ve already swung a baseball bat at the demo but went deeper into the underground in the hope that I’d find something there worth clinging on to.

Share this:

Omerta: City of Gangsters is out now and I’ve spent many an hour conquering Atlantic City, building an empire of bullets and booze. I’m not quite ready to tell you wot I think so I thought I’d use the posting of the launch trailer as an excuse to spill some secrets in your ear. I expressed my disappointment with the demo shortly after playing it, but I’m much less apathetic now. Omerta is an old-fashioned management game, with a simple but effective campaign structure and few frills, but its pin-striped heart beats steady. It doesn’t have the charm of Tropico, or that game’s simulated civilians, but it wears its theme well and performs turn-based combat in a clunky but effective fashion. Full thoughts later this week.

Share this:

Omerta’s demo is odd. I’ve been hoping that the game will deliver on its turn-based gangster shenanigans ever since it was announced, but I expected mild disappointment as none of the pre-release media had entirely convinced me. A demo seems like the perfect solution, providing a playable sample and helping my wayward mind to form some basic conclusions. That hasn’t happened. Instead, I’m still left with a strong interest in playing the game that Omerta might be, while at the same time half-convinced that Omerta isn’t going to be that game. You can download the demo for yourself or read on for more meandering opinions and details.

Share this:

Here’s some Prohibition news: I watched Lawless last year and even though it’s paced badly at times, I enjoyed it and marvelled at Shia TheBeef doing some proper acting. Keep the lad away from Spielberg and Bay and he might have a bright future in the business called ‘show’. Or at least a less obvious one. Omerta takes place in the big city rather than out in the sticks but, like Lawless, it’s about guns, gangsters and odd pacing, the latter due to its turn-based nature. Craig pointed out that the latest trailer is a Mac trailer and it also reuses lots of footage from the previous video, but it does show more of the strategic interface and has a toe-tapping tune.